Have several video clips from DSLR with terrible sound, and one audio file from zoom. It was a bend concert. Zoom was recording all the time but clips are separated, as there were breaks from song to song and break where i did not want to record.
I am aware there is option to combine one audio file and one video clip, but is there a way to import all clips and audio file at once and have them sync, atleast some of them ?
I am using Premiere and FinalCutX.
This sounds like a perfect candidate for using multi-camera editing. You can automagically synch all the clips using their audio, and turn them into a multicam source, which lets you edit from the multiple synched cameras quickly and easily.
How to do it in premiere:
Select your clips in the Project panel. Then, right-click the selected clips and choose Create Multi-camera Source Sequence from the context menu.
It will then let you choose the synch method, in your case use audio. Also set the audio Sequence Settings to the clip with the good audio, and it will only use it in the sequence.
You now have a multicamera source clip, you can edit from it as if you were doing a live vision mix by choosing the camera you want to use while it plays (with of course the luxury of being able to go back and redo it and tweak the edits. The details of how to do multi camera edits are here.
The workflow in FCP7 was very similar to Premiere, but I'm not familiar with FCX, have a look here to get started.
Create a timeline from the master audio track, then drop the video clips one by one onto a matching video track using the native sound from those clips as a guide to line them up with the good audio. Then mute or delete the audio from the clips.
Premiere and FCP-X both have auto-sync features to get multiple audio and video clips synced together. Chances are very good that you can get your first video clip to align with the audio clip automatically. You might then be able to incrementally sync each additional clip with the audio clip, one at a time. I'm pretty sure neither program would do anything intelligent if you just selected all video clips and asked it to align them all with the audio file. But each might be smart enough to link them one at a time.
For your next shoot, you should consider making a slate for each clip. To begin, shoot a video of a clock or a watch (perhaps from your smartphone) next to the Zoom and clap. That tells you how your clock reference relates to your audio file. Then, during the show, start each video shot by looking at your clock or watch reference, then record as normal. When you are all done, each clip will begin with a time reference that you can normalize against the initial time, and which will tell you roughly where to put the clips on the timeline. You can then synchronize manually, as suggested by Jim Mack, above.
Syncing video tracks by correlating the audio was the original application called "PluralEyes". The functionality was incorporated in to higher-end video NLE apps as mentioned here previously. But the original app is still available and being improved.
